Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature. – Jean Cocteau
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live. – Jean Cocteau
Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently. – Jean Cocteau
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail. – Jean Cocteau
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper. – Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying. – Jean Cocteau
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee. – Jean Cocteau
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. – Jean Cocteau
You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive. – Jean Cocteau
There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard. – Jean Cocteau
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up. – Jean Cocteau
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul. – Jean Cocteau
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them. – Jean Cocteau
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death. – Jean Cocteau
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul. – Jean Cocteau
I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another. – Jean Cocteau
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. – Jean Cocteau